Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis

(Hoover Institution Press) In this book, Taylor provides empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began. He explores how unusually easy monetary policy helped to set the crisis in motion, and shows how the use of subprime mortgages, encouraged by government programs designed to promote home ownership, led to excessive risk taking. Taylor also suggests a set of principles to prevent misguided actions and interventions in the future. Taylor is the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University.